THE BOOKFISH

THALASSOLOGY, SHAKESPEARE, AND SWIMMING

William Ruddiman, professor emeritus from UVA, has one of the more controversial theses out there in terms of climate science. He argues, based on long-term studies, that human-driven climate change is not a recent, post-industrial phenomenon, but rather began with the dawn of agriculture around 12,000 years ago. Clearing forests to plant crops began soon after, with the results that around 5-6,000 years ago, when methane and other carbon levels should have been decreasing in the run-up to another ice age, levels rose instead. In Ruddiman’s view, the past 5,000 years of relative climate stability “may actually reflect a coincidental near-balance between a natural cooling that should have begun and an offsetting warming effect caused by humans” (94).

The second-level controversial claim Ruddiman makes is that, since humans have been modifying the climate for millenia, it’s not possible under any regime to return to a “natural” path. Taking a geological approach to time, he instead suggests that we are in the middle of a 400-year carbon intensive period, during which humanity will exhaust first oil (almost now), then natural gas, and then finally coal reserves. At the end of that period, all the easily accessible carbon will be in gaseous form, and the end result of the experiment — can the world ocean absorb that much carbon, and what will the consequences of the resulting acidification be? — will slowly become apparent. In the medium term, he’s more worried about topsoil and water shortages than fuel, though he does think that oil is nearly depleted now.

With curiosity, some abstraction, and a general desire to caution against alarmism on the green or brown sides, Ruddiman suggests that climate modification is what humans do. Interesting stuff.

This is the World just before men. Too violently pitched alive in constant flow ever to be seen by men directly. They are meant only to look at it dead, in still strata, transputrefied to oil or coal. Alive, it was a threat: it was Titans, was an overpeaking of life so clangorous and mad, such a green corona about Earth’s body that some spoiler had to be brought in before it blew Creation apart. So we, the crippled keepers, were sent out to multiply, to have dominion. God’s spoilers. Us. Counter-revolutionaries. It is our mission to promote death. (Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow 720).

I knew it was going to be a good day when I found street parking right across from Penn Station on 31st St. It wasn’t legal — there can’t possibly be any legal parking around there — but it was just the right size, nestled in between an unmarked TSA van and a traffic control Prius. A good, free, safe place to leave the car for 45 minutes before I picked up my first visitor, Rosamond Purcell.

The weekend before, I’d stopped through Rosamond’s studio in Somerville, MA, where we’d packed up framed prints of nine gorgeous images to hang in the Institute for Writing Studies at St. John’s. On Friday, Rosamond and her collaborator Michael Witmore were coming to campus to talk about how a visual artist and a Shakespeare scholar work together, and produce such strangely beautiful things.

We picked up Mike, who’s recently become the Director of the Folger Shakespeare Library, on the Upper East Side. By coincidence, we were near a store named “Tender Buttons,” which shares that name with the poetry press co-founded by my St. John’s colleague Lee Ann Brown. Both derive from the same Gertrude Stein book of poetry. Another good sign.

We had about 30 – 40 people at the talk, not bad for a Friday afternoon. We got a real treat in terms of hearing about the shared commitment to this unusual collaboration. Rosamond took the pictures in a meadow in northern New Hampshire in the summertime, bouncing light off old, slightly dented, irregularly-colored antique double-mirrored bottles once used to store light-sensitive dyes. “Light tight,” she said was how they were described. Mike then looked at the images until a line or moment from Shakespeare came into his mind. He said it usually took about 10 seconds to get a fix on it — and when it didn’t come to him, he moved on to the next picture.

What we were really talking about, as I’d hoped when I first imagined this course, was the interface between the visual and the textual in Shakespeare, and in our imaginations more generally. It’s not always possible to put into words what these images show, though we all see things there, sometimes even the same things. As one of my students said — and their questions to our distinguished guests made their professor proud — the images-with-text were themselves like performances, dramatic responses to the play. Unlike a stage performance or a film that unfurls in time, these images juxtapose poetic form and visual intensity in a simultaneous frozen instant.

Or, as Shakespeare says, these images are

Like perspectives, which rightly gazed upon / Show nothing but confusion, eyed awry / Distinguish form (Richard II, 2.2)

The evening continued with some great post-talk chat and questions from undergraduate and grad students, and then a tasty dinner in Astoria at the Kebab Cafe on Steinway St., a favorite haunt of several St. John’s professors and Queens foodies. When I was scooping out the cheeks of the roasted whole fish we shared for dinner — Long Island Sound porgy, a little bigger than the ones my son catches off the dock down the street from my house — I thought about how good it is to share strange things.

O, the most piteous cry of the poor souls! Sometimes to see ’em, and not to see ’em; now the ship boring the moon with her mainmast, and anon swallowed with yeast and froth, as you’d thrust a cork into a hogshead.

Just re-read this one for a panel I’ll be moderating about marine environmental literature at Final Frontiers: Exploring Oceans, Islands, and Coastal Environments, a weekend conference at the Island Institute in coastal Maine in mid-October. Haven’t been through it since ninth grade, when I found it frankly a bit dull. Hemingway’s combination of high modernist style and old-fashioned masculinism has grown on me somewhat, or perhaps I’m just a more sympathetic reader now.

As an imagination of the limits and fantasies of human bodies in an oceanic world, it’s quite a rich little prose-poem, and a very promising text for blue cultural studies. The moment that grabbed me, though, was the old man’s brief vision of an airy rather than oceanic globalism:

It must be very strange in an airplane, he thought. I wonder what the sea looks like from that height? They should be able to see the fish well if they do not fly too high. I would like to fly very slowly at two hundred fathoms high and see the fish from above. In
the turtle boats I was in the cross-trees of the mast-head and even at that height I saw much. The dolphin look greener from there and you can see their stripes and their purple spots and you can see all of the school as they swim. Why is it that all the fast-moving fish of the dark current have purple backs and usually purple stripes or spots? The dolphin looks green of course because he is really golden. But when he comes to feed, truly hungry, purple stripes show on his sides as on a marlin. Can it be anger, or the greater speed he makes that brings them out? (71-2)

Hemingway’s a hinge figure in so many ways, but here he reaches forward, from wet to airy globalism. If you follow the logic of this passage, it starts by a fantasy of altitude — the view from above — and then dives into color-distorting salt water. Looks green but really golden: the dolphin fish surely allegorizes something.

When the lights were out after Irene, I had the great pleasure of reading this hybrid memoir-cum-history by Gott’s Island summer resident Christina Gillis. She and her husband John had just hosted Ian and me for a day-trip to Gott’s Island the week before, at the end of our Maine trip, so I had an eerie sense of recent physical memory of some of the places she describes — the dock, the granite “sidewalk” that surrounds the Atlantic side of the island where Ian and I caught juvenile mackerel, the open-ness of the old center of the village, and the constant presence of history, especially of the early 20th-century agricultural and fishing village that decided, apparently en masse, to vacate the island in the 1920s.

Christina’s book interweaves two painful human stories: the unexpected loss of her son Ben, who died in an air wreck in Kenya in 1991, and the death of Miss Peterson, a solitary Gott’s island resident whose house burned in the winter of 1926, when the island was depopulating. She also explores the life and works of the poet Ruth Moore, who formerly owned the house in which she and John have spent the past 40 summers.

The books’ central conceit — Christina is very much an English professor, with a specialty in the 18c novel — is writing on stone, the question of how permanent the marks humans make on a rocky coastal island can become. She spends quite a bit of time thinking and writing about the village cemetery — the cover image is a view of her house from the cemetery — and the book closes with a spare photo of Benjamin Gillis’s gravestone.

It’s not in any way a sentimental book, though as a parent I find the story simply terrifying. I also can’t help recalling that I’m roughly Ben’s age, and I also spent 1990-1 worrying my parents with far-off adventures, for me in Asia, Alaska, and Australia, rather than Africa. The book is a tribute to things that survive, and the limits of how deeply human beings can mark geography. She’s got a rich, measured tone when she writes about the island —

Never entirely fixed, our gauge of time and tide, the dock reflects the pace of life on the island. At low tide, with the pool an empty expanse of mud and stones, when the float sits inertly on the pebbly, shell-strewn ooze, the island falls into a lull, as if left to itself, to contemplation, to chores, to life that does not extend far beyond itself. It seems to wait for the incoming tide that will enable the dock to float and become once again the connecting point with the mainland. (15)

Ian and I had a charmed day on the magic granite of Gott’s. Feeling a bit like trespassers as we tromped up the beach with our fishing poles and tackle box, we arrived a low tide, and our boat, piloted by Christiana’s cousin, could not get to the dock. Islands are hermetic spaces — “not utopias,” Christina’s husband John, author of Islands of the Mind, laughingly insisted as we walked through the remnants of some old houses on the island’s spine, but closed and inward-looking.

That day, something happened that’s never happened to me before in all my years of fishing: I caught a fish with my first cast at our first spot, on the granite sidewalk, not far from the “box on the rocks” where Paul de Man apparently used to spend his summers writing. Ian also caught one with his first cast in our last spot of the day, at the dock that Christina describes as the heart of the island.

How possible is it to write on the stone of Gott’s island? The human history of those stones is relatively short, not even a blink inside their geological span. For the past 80 years or so the human side has only been a summertime story, since no on overwinters these days. “I hear the crickets on the island,” writes Christina, but “I will not see the frost” (167).

Coach Frank told me this morning, during a fairly awkward 3500-yd workout in the pool after my 10 days in Maine, that my freestyle breathing was a little off. He wants me to angle my head farther forward, exhale sooner while my face is underwater, and breathe forward, while reaching down and out with my right arm. Right now I’m a bit cock-eyed, with my left arm plunging ahead and my right never quite catching up.

He also said that, as I sit just under 8 weeks out from the Bermuda swim, that improving my breathing is the biggest change I can make in my swimming before the race.

Breathing in the water is the key point, the thing we mammals can’t really do that well, the thing that reminds us we’re not well-suited to the water. Turning my head, and following it with the trunk of my body, every stroke or three impedes my forward thrust. When it’s working, I get a decent side to side action along the keels of each side of my ribs. But it doesn’t always work, esp when I’ve been out of the pool for a week or so.

Thinking hard about breathing while swimming reminds me of a great Ozzie novel, Tim Winton’s Breath(2008), set in the wild surf country of Western Australia. It’s a rich, moving, intense story of physical danger and the lure of the ocean, following two friends, Picklet and Loonie, who compete at holding their breath underwater and then end up surfing remote breaks with sharks and a mysterious American surf-loner. It takes an odd but moving turn toward other kinds of asphyxiation in its second half, in sexual games and, eventually, in Picklet’s adult career as an emergency medic. An exhausted, deeply felt melancholy broods over the second half of the novel.

But at its center is a hymn to surfing as a way of being-in the world ocean that’s as gorgeous as any I’ve read —

I will always remember my first wave that morning. The smells of paraffin wax and brine and peppy scrub. The way the swell rose beneath me like a body drawing in air. How the wave drew me forward and I sprang to my feet, skating with the wind of momentum in my ears. I leant across the wall of upstanding waters and the board came with me as though it was part of my body and mind. The blur of spray. The billion shards of light. I remember the solitary watching figure on the beach and the flash of Loonie’s smile as I flew by; I was intoxicated. And though I’ve lived to be an old man with my own share of happiness for all the mess I made, I still judge every joyous moment, every victory and revelation against those few seconds of living. (35)

Losing and not-quite recovering that youthful joy structures the novel, for Picklet and Loonie and for the American couple Sando and Eva. The final image of the novel returns to Picklet as a 50-year old divorced surfer with slightly opaque relationships with his two daughters and his former self, but still aesthetically connected to moving salt water —

My favourite time is when we’re all at the Point, because when they see me out on the water I don’t have to be cautious and I’m never ashamed. Out there I’m free. I don’t require management. They probably don’t understand this, but it’s important for me to show them that their father is a man who dances — who saves lives and carries the wounded, yes, but who also does something completely pointless and beautiful, and in this at least he should need no explanation. (218)

It’s the sort of thing that makes an old swimmer like me want to take up surfing.

Got this one as a gift from my awesome bro-in-law Maury Sterling, who heard the author on an NPR story & thought he sounded like the Michael Pollan of water. Sounds good to me, though perhaps a tall order. Fishman’s got great material and a lively, slightly breathless, prose style, but not quite Pollan’s speculative range. I do like the watery focus.

I especially like the second chapter, “The Secret Life of Water,” which reminds us that our planet’s water originally “came from an interstellar cloud somewhere in the Milky Way” (29), that liquid water is concentrated on the planet’s surface, except that roughly 5 times as much water as flows above ground is stored inside rocks within the planet , which perhaps explains the relative stability of the depth of the oceans (39), and that all the water on the planet has been circulating for a very long time — each glass of water we drink or drop of rain that hits our skin fell or flowed during the age of the dinosaurs, and much earlier also. Water is also, as he reminds us, the essential chemical for life as we know it.

There’s some very nice reporting here from Australia, working through a brutal 10-year drought that’s drained the Murray River, and India, with perhaps the most dysfunctional domestic water policy of any large, growing-rich, nation. Mike Young, who teaches at the U of Adelaide, has an elegant scheme for proper water use allocation: first, “maintenance water” (enough to keep the rivers flowing), next “critical human needs” (washing and drinking), then “high security water” (which is somewhat expensive), and last “low security water” (which is fairly cheap, but on dry years might not be plentiful). He estimates that the first 2 categories will take 20% off the top in most years, then a price system will allocate the high v low security needs of agriculture, industry, etc (281-87). It rationalizes the currently haphazard system: “Allocating the opportunities to use water gives us the quality of life we have” (287).

Thinking about fresh water, which is the bulk of water use policy questions, also leads Fishman to a striking aphorism

There is no global water crisis, because all water problems are local.

Simply b/c it’s so hard to move water, and so much water is lost in transit, this watershed-centric mantra suggests that we might need to push back against our globalist views. I’m reminded of the sage of Middlebury’s vision of local energy and food economies.

I wonder if we might want to revise that aphorism a bit —

All fresh water is local; all salt water is global.

That doesn’t quite work for the fresh water moved by clouds and rainstorms, in which water molecules spend an average of 9 days in gaseous form, but it’s an interesting way to think about local/global issues. Or maybe what Fishman means is that all water shortages are local — the only way to repair them is to clean & reuse the water that’s already near at hand. The planet-wide circulation of salt water, which drove global commerce and settlement in the Age of Sail, doesn’t really speak to irrigation or “thirst,” except perhaps via big desalinization plants like the one Fishman describes in Perth.

Fishman also takes pains not to sound too gloomy — here he reminds me a bit of the “least depressing book on fishing” that came out last year — and he cites Las Vegas’s strict recycling system, recently constructed in the face of massive population growth and very little water, as a model. Despite resistance to “toilet to tap” cleaning systems, he seems pretty convinced they are the wave of the future, as in a two-tier systems providing drinking water and also “purple-spigot” water for outdoor use. Farmers especially needs to improve water policies, whether in the Murray Basin or the Imperial Valley of CA: “Agriculture needs a blue revolution to follow its green revolution” (303).

I read this one pre-Prague, and as I think about reading it now, it’s a three-stage process that I think says as much about academic books in general as this book in particular.

First, eager anticipation: the blurb on the back from Barry Cunliffe — “this is the book that I have been waiting for” — got the hook in me pretty good. I’ve been waiting for a broad-brush exploration of the cultural meanings of the sea, with the sort of comparative and wide-ranging focus that I know I won’t write myself. John Mack teaches World Art History at East Anglia & he seems like just the person for the job.

Second, impatience. Sometimes I worry that there’s so much defensive writing in academic prose, so much base-covering and literature summarizing that even a book with a great salt heart doesn’t let itself sing. Mack’s early chapters are wonderfully comprehensive and would make a great introduction to maritime studies for a grad student in any number of humanities fields. But despite a couple of compelling focalizing images — Sutton Hoo and Madagascar — and a very careful, professional, reliable-seeming survey of assorted fields, I started to get impatient after the first 100 pages. It didn’t help that the brief references to Shakespeare were misled by relying too much on Jonathan Raban’s Oxford Book of the Sea.

Then I came to chapter 3, “Navigation and the Arts of Performance,” and I figured out what Cunliffe was praising. Working through two non-Western navigators, Ibn Majid and Tupaia, he unpacks a dynamic understanding of how sailors locate themselves that relies less on determanistic ideas like plotting or fixed location and more on poetic forms — Ibn Majid wrote his navigational works in verse — and in-the-moment laboring entanglement in the multiple changing seascape —

There is a sense in which the conditions confronted from moment to moment require a continuous creative engagement between navigator and the conditions of nature encountered at sea. (115)

Indeed it an be argued that translating indigenous practice into graphic form is potentially flawed for the experience of the sea is not fundamentally about the measurement of objective space but the sense of movement within it. (119)

Navigation is a complete, embodied, synaesthetic activity. (129)

After drawing this vision of seamanlike metis from classical Arabic and 18c Polynesian sources, he turns at last to Conrad and his vison of seamanship as moral beauty, an example of “the aesthetics of working in combination” (134), and a conception of “navigation as an art of performance” (135). It’s not quite the poetry-as-metis analogy that I’m working on right now for my book on shipwreck, but it’s pretty close, and very helpful.

The rest of the book didn’t, for me, return to the heights of this navigation chapter, though the section of shipboard societies (“Arguably ships are the first truly cosmopolitan spaces” 137), on the beach (“an ambiguous place, a in-between place” 165), and on the vision of the sea from the land (with a nice excursus on our fascination with sailor talk from Dana to O’Brian). Finally he returns to Sutton Hoo to rethink the sea-land split: “less a terrestrial appropriation of the sea than an offering of the things of the sea to the land” (216).

All good and useful stuff — but the chapter on navigation is the one that roils my waters.

While in the belly of the biggest bird in the world over the Atlantic on Sunday night, I read Ursula Heise’s quite wonderful book Sense of Place, Sense of Planet, and was very struck by what she had to say about “deterritorialization,” a term she gets from recent theorists of the global (Giddens, Beck, Appadurai, theorists of the cognate term “cosmopolitanism” inc Appiah, Nussbaum, etc). She also derives some of her thinking from DeLilo, esp Underworld, though she writes, quite interestingly, about White Noise.

No time to think through these things before breakfast in Prague, but I found on the Times website today this op-ed about a more literal form of deterritorialization, which is about to affect island nations in the Pacific as sea levels rise. It’s an interesting reminder that some of the hybrid or decentered values that are dear to intellectuals can also be uncomfortable, impractical, and also painfully real.

Says Nina to her father Almayer at the turning point of Conrad’s first novel, which I listened to the audio of while driving from SF to LAX last week. She’s about to abandon him to a lonely existence on a bend of a Bornean river — probably northeastern Borneo, Kal-Tim, on the Mahakam River, it appears — so that she can flee with her Balinese prince. Almayer’s great hope was to make one last financial strike, perhaps find Rajah Laut’s gold mine, and then present Nina to Europe. She’d rather go to Bali.

In many ways the plot reads like a rehearsal for the second half of Lord Jim, with the addition of Almayer himself and a happy ending for the multi-ethnic couple. (Jim, I suppose, is his own Almayer as well as Prince Dain.) A young novelist in 1895, Conrad balances his dark visions of human insufficiency with the storylines of romance.

Conrad wrote a trilogy about Rajah Laut and Indonesia — Laut, a fictional white rajah along the lines of James Brooke of Sarawak, was Almayer’s patron, and he figures in the other novels as well — The Outcast of the Islands (1896) and The Rescue (1920).

This little book of poetry is a brilliant conceit, with some nuggets of genius and quite a few moments in which the endeavor falls flat. Anthony Caleshu, a New England-born poet currently based in the U of Plymouth in the UK, has taken Moby-Dick and hashed it into a short book of poems. I remember finding the first, and best, of these lyrics in the TLS a few years ago —

I am imagining what you are imagining

To be conscious of your head is to be conscious of what it might

hit: a table’s corner, a fire surround. When your head hits my head,

we see a picture of a whale that is not a whale at all…

The book’s full title, from Melville’s chapters 56-7, lay out the poet’s ambition to hitch a ride on the whaleman’s manic journey: Of Whales: In Print, in Paint, in Sea, in Stars, in Coin, in House, in Margins.

The sub-story in these poems appears to involve a father & a newborn son, and at times its cozy domestic drama strains against the Melvillean grandeur. No reason these things can’t be made to fit together — but they don’t, here.

Which leaves the best bits as the most explicit engagements & pastiches of Melville: a great poem that admits that Bulkington “might be our favorite chapter” (30), another on Charles Olson’s “two Moby-Dicks” theory of the late-breaking creation of Ahab (43), some fine descriptive poems based on illustrations from 19c whaling manuals, one of which appears on the cover. Also a concluding plea not to sink too deep into obsession: “We remind ourselves that it is just a book, even if it tells the story of our lives” (66).

My favorite moment concerns Melville’s sister Augusta, left at home with the task of “making fair my brother’s cryptic hand.” She reads with interest an episode in which the crews joys in their triumph over the White Whale. which leads her to make a few changes —

Without Herman looking over my shoulder, and remembering the words of Augustine, it occurred to me that God’s fair hand was only as good as his heavy one. So I duly sunk the Pequod and Ahab and all but the storyteller from the whole heathen crew.

That’s the way to read a great American novel! We should do this sort of thing to other texts. Don Quixote is the obvious choice, or The Tempest, or maybe Cortazar’s Around the Day in Thirty Worlds…

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Congratulations to literature scholar, digital humanities innovator, and two-time @NEH_ODH grantee Dr. Katherine Rowe, named the new president of the College of @williamandmary. https://t.co/EFDCzeKEX5